These 8 entertaining stories (defining diverse) spin a fast read: edgy in some tales, nostalgic in others, lustrous always. Lammy Provocateur Fritscher is the best kind of award-winning author: one who disappears behind his characters, dialog, and textured plots. His stylish fiction carries the 20th- century reader through the door of Y2K. Here is human love, new and ageless, in all its tender genders, comic banana slips, identity ironies, and family silences. The subtext: people crave, not sex, but intimacy and connection. Stories include: the breathless satire, "Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way"; the reflexive college-faculty comedy, "The Unseen Hand in the Lavender Light"; the Alaskan cruise-ship adventure, "The Story Knife"; the Hitchcockian suspense-thriller, "Missing Persons"; the hospital-issue drama, "Silent Mothers, Silent Sons"; and the tale of two couples all surrogately wrong for each other in "Sweet Embraceable You Cover" (told twice here: as brilliant little story and as snappy one-act play first staged in San Francisco). This fresh collection of diverse entertainments also includes an easy-to-read indie screenplay, "Duchess: Berlin 1927." Appealing. Accessible. Amazing.

Author Bio: JACK FRITSCHER, like ANNE RICE, famously crosses literary genres and emerges as a cult best seller with work published in 30 magazines, a dozen anthologies, plus more than 100,000 copies sold of his books and 250,000 copies sold of his videos. CAMILLE PAGLIA uses his writing in her Vamps and Tramps, and The New Republic compared his novel Some Dance to Remember (epic gay history: 1970-82) to GORE VIDAL and JAMES BALDWIN.